Jose Rodriguez and the Ninety-Two Tapes

There was a certain value in the “60 Minutes” interview with Jose Rodriguez, a C.I.A. official who has no regrets about overseeing the torture of prisoners: to provide a textbook example of what it means to have an unreliable narrator, just in case everyone was bored with English-class offerings like Ford Madox Ford’s “The Good Soldier.” It was less valuable as a model of journalistic interrogation: Rodriguez was allowed to make a case for torture, and promote his book, “Hard Measures,” under fairly mild questioning.

Rodriguez did not forthrightly argue that torture—the contained drowning of waterboarding, slapping and stress positions, keeping detainees in a “cramped confinement box with an insect,” keeping them naked and awake for days on end by any means necessary, holding electric drills to their heads and telling them that their female family members would be raped in Middle Eastern prisons—was an awful necessity when there was no other option. Instead, he underplayed what he and his operatives had done (making suspects “uncomfortable”) and bragged about its use in proving the manhood of the torturer (“We needed to get everybody in government to put their big boy pants on and provide the authorities that we needed”; “The objective is to let him know there’s a new sheriff in town.”). He talked as if torture were an expression of strength, rather than momentary domination masking the most abject moral and practical weakness.

That sour mix of false pride and real shame runs through Rodriguez’s story. One of the acts he is best known for is the destruction of ninety-two video tapes documenting the multiple waterboardings of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who planned the September 11th attacks, and Abu Zubaydah, an alleged Al Qaeda operative, in secret prisons—tapes that he had been explicitly told to preserve as part of an official investigation. (As Dana Priest notes, a minor, mechanical disclosure in his book is that the means of destruction was an industrial-strength shredder that “can chew through hundreds of pounds of material in a single hour,” with “five spinning and two stationary blades.”) Rodriguez loudly repeats that he had authorization for everything he did—that he was a good soldier—and then smashed up the best evidence, saying that they were “ugly visuals” and would endanger his men. Whether the danger was legal or from “terrorists” is ambiguous; the ugliness, though, is clear.

The Bush Administration, of course, did authorize much too much. But a memo is not a universal declaration of legality: it doesn’t make torture legal, and it can’t make it right.

Nor can it make torture work. Jane Mayer has written definitiveaccounts of how the C.I.A. badly lost its way in both cases, and how much of our country’s identity was compromised. The rationalization that Rodriguez and others give is, first, that we learned so much, and, second, that these guys just deserved it. But did we learn anything from torture, except about ourselves? There is much evidence to suggest that Rodriguez and others are simply lying when they claim that the torture produced reliable intelligence. Ali Soufan, who, as an interrogator with the F.B.I., did learn something from K.S.M. and other suspects, has written extensively about how they stopped, rather than started, coming up with anything really valuable once the C.I.A. started going on about big-boy pants. On Monday, Senators Dianne Feinstein and Carl Levin, respectively the chairmen of the Senate Intelligence and Armed Services Committees, who are involved in a three-year Senate investigation of the C.I.A.’s use of harsh interrogation techniques, issued a joint press release that said,

Statements made by Mr. Rodriguez and other former senior government officials about the role of the CIA interrogation program in locating Usama bin Laden (UBL) are inconsistent with CIA records.

But would it have matter if torture had “worked,” given the awful work it does on us, as a country? The word “torture” itself is danced around in the broadcast. It comes up a few times, when it can’t be avoided and after Rodriguez’s comparison to jet lag and a good workout. “But I mean, these were enhanced interrogation techniques,” Lesley Stahl says. “Other people call it torture. This was—this wasn’t benign in any—any sense of the word.” Rodriguez responds,

I’m not trying to say that they were benign. But the problem is here is that people don’t understand that this program was not about hurting anybody. This program was about instilling a sense of hopelessness and despair on the terrorist, on the detainee, so that he would conclude on his own that he was better off cooperating with us.

“Other people call it torture”: can’t we say what torture is, and that we did it? There is an emptiness in saying that it is not “about hurting anybody” that no good intentions can fill. Later, Stahl says, “President Obama has said that what we did was torture.” Rodriguez:

Well, President Obama is entitled to his opinion. When President Obama condemns the covert action activities of a previous government, he is breaking the covenant that exists between intelligence officers who are at the pointy end of the spear, hanging way out there, and the government that authorized them and directed them to go there.

Is the relevant covenant between the intelligence agencies and the executive branch or between our government and the people, bound by the Constitution? Obama, as it happens, decided that torture-related crimes would not be pursued; he wanted to close the book on that chapter, assuming, perhaps, that everyone shared his sense of shame. But torturers, it turns out, don’t close books; they write them.

CIA/AP Photo.

Amy Davidson Sorkin, a New Yorker staff writer, is a regular contributor to Comment for the magazine and writes a Web column, in which she covers war, sports, and everything in between.

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